Some clips are five-minute monologues, others are 30-second arguments. I like how the plot meanders and then changes pace abruptly. They’re written so that, if you think hard enough, you can pinpoint the other perspective in the database, which is often a missing puzzle piece. Conversations between two people are split into separate clips so that you can only hear one side of the audio at a time. The writing matches the acting for quality, and there’s always a deeper meaning to what a character says and doesn’t say, such as when David reads bedtime stories to his daughter. Shipp is particularly good as Ava: likeable, tragic, and complex. I often lost myself in the raw emotion of a scene, forgetting my task at hand. The cast make me feel the weight of each line, whether they’re crying to a loved one or having phone sex.
What makes the performances so remarkable is that even though every word in Telling Lies’ script is deliberately placed so that you can search for it in the database, nothing feels forced. “The acting is some of the best I’ve seen in any video game. You can scrub through clips by clicking and dragging your mouse to speed up or slow the footage, which made me feel like a cop in a police procedural, and I regularly rewound through sections to pick up scraps I’d missed the first time around. It starts off simple and becomes wonderfully dark and twisted, and each new storyline you discover is another rabbit hole to dive into. To say more would be to spoil it, because figuring out exactly how their lives interact is the best bit of Telling Lies.
You follow the interconnected lives of Emma, a nurse, played by Kerry Bishé (Argo), environmental activist Ava, played by Alexandra Shipp (X-Men Apocalypse), webcam model Michelle, played by Angela Sarafyan (Westworld), and the mysterious David himself, played by Logan Marshall-Green (Spider-Man: Homecoming). By watching more, you learn to narrow your searches to focus on specific topics, eventually getting to the juicy bits. Searching keywords shows clips organised by date: search something vague like ‘love’ and you’ll get 34 matches, but the system limits you by only allowing you to watch the five earliest clips. You play from the perspective of a woman on her laptop in a sleek apartment, trawling through an NSA surveillance database for an unknown reason.
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